Blog / What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR Process)?

What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR Process)?

What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR Process)?

The time comes when you need to scan documents that packed with handwritten notes or pages from a printed book. This is where OCR (Optical Character Recognition) takes place for user convenience. This advanced technology assists for analyzing printed or even handwritten text and precisely turns it into an editable digital file. For instance, you can use this image to text converter that uses OCR feature to extract text from image without losing formatting.

In this context, we gathered certain information regarding OCR that might be works best for you!

What Is OCR?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process to recognize text loaded within images, such as scanned documents and photos. This widespread technology is functions to convert any image that consists written text (handwritten, typed, or printed) to machine-readable text data.

Once the text is digitized accurately, both searching and editing the text can be done electronically. In addition to that, the storage is more compact and even documents can be showed online.

How Does OCR Work?

When a handwritten or printed page is scanned, it is stored as a bit-mapped file (TIF) format. One can easily read this photo when it is displayed on the screen. However, when it comes to computer, it is only seems like a series of white and black dots. OCR precisely looks at every single line of the image and identify if there’s the series of dots match with a particular number of letter.

Benefits of OCR:

There are innumerable benefits of OCR, but we shortlisted the most obvious one’s:

1. Searching and Manipulating Data

The ability of OCR makes it possible to entirely search for the text and locate the particular sections of the documents by search for the specific keywords. Moreover, it works perfectly for editing the document with a word processor.

2. Assist for the Blind and Visually Impaired

Screen readers can swiftly decode the machine-readable text and even read out the words on screen. This is the way by which visually impaired people can understand.

3. Swift Data Entry

OCR is the efficient process that works best for improving the efficiency of the office work significantly. You can find that mostly offices are deals with a huge number of documents regarding scanning concerns, this is where OCR comes into picture to increase and maintain productivity.

What are the different types of OCR?

There are a wide array of OCR types, but we shortlisted few related examples that you may encounter, they are:

  • Simple OCR functions to transform printed text into machine readable characters by swiftly analyzing a database of both font and text images. This can be used regarding pattern matching algorithms for figuring out the individual characters from within a document
  • Zonal Recognition is another technology that mainly considered for extracting information from within a document. When it comes to digitizing forms, it can scans specific areas of a document
  • Optical mark recognition is well-known for processing information that marked within fields, on surveys or tests. In addition to that, it can be utilized for identifying the logos, watermarks, and different other symbols that takes place within a document
  • Barcode readers use lasers for extracting information that stored within a barcode. On the other hand, barcode OCR extracts this data from the source of digital image of a barcode. When it comes to digitizing process, this will automates the process of extracting barcode from the documents
  • Intelligent word recognition typically used on its own or even commence combination with different other OCR types for recognizing entire words from within a document. This is indicated as the accurate OCR process because each characters can entirely identified and even verified that based on the context in which they appear

Thankfully, you people know explore different aspects of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Hope this post works best regarding OCR functions. Good Luck!